Her life story ... Leslie Lewis Sword as Immaculée Ilibagiza in Miracle in Rwanda.
As ever, the Edinburgh Fringe is stuffed with gimmicky, one-joke shows this year, such as Jihad: The Musical. But there's another, infinitely more depressing, kind of production that is thriving here - a kind of theatrical equivalent of "misery lit". This breed of biography-based plays has very little to do with art (they have only the merest veneer of it) and everything to do with flogging a lump in the throat and a neatly packaged, easy-to-take-home uplift.
Miracle in Rwanda at the Gilded Balloon is a case in point. This is a stage adaptation of Immaculée Ilibagiza's book about how she survived the 1994 genocide in Rwanda by hiding in a bathroom for 91 days with seven other women and children. I don't for a moment question that Ilibagiza's story is remarkable. A Tutsi, her entire family were killed, and she was given shelter by a Hutu pastor, who risked his own life in hiding her (the militia searched his house several times). But Leslie Lewis Sword's version makes for a heavy, simplistic play. The characterization is rudimentary and there is barely a mixed emotion in sight.
Unlike, say, Truth in Translation, Miracle in Rwanda has no real political content. It is certainly not a powerful enough piece of theatre to bring home a fraction of the horror of genocide, or to make anyone who sees it boil with anger at the west's failure to intervene in the slaughter. The show simply peddles the infantile line that all problems can be solved by forgiveness and faith.
Still, the show is packing in the punters and I'm willing to bet that it will get a long line of positive reviews. Why do audiences and critics swallow shows like this the way fish snap bait? My hunch is that what they are responding to - and clapping - is not the play itself, but what the protagonist went through. Tellingly, a CD of Ilibagiza praying is on sale after Miracle in Rwanda.
